Well well well...you found my very first tape recorder!!
The one I used to sit and stare at before I had even started 1st grade! My parents had two of those machines (mono and stereo) and I think I became hooked on tape recorders as a little kid when I'd see those reels turning while the recorders captured all our holidays etc....well before the invention of video cameras of course.
In case you didn't notice, the right side part in the picture actually does double duty as speaker and lid for the whole thing. Also, there was no vu on these things..only an orange light that would change in intensity depending on how loud the sound was going into the little mics....the orange light looked e-x-a-c-t-l-y like the face of the robot on the old "Lost In Space" tv show when the robot would talk...I was always sure that idea on the show came from the old Voice of Music tape recorders.
The mono recorder was the older of the two we had and was from 1957 or so.
I believe one or both of those things are still in the family somewhere. When I was ten or so, I would use them to record things off the tv and radio and for a time, I would use one of them for my earliest stabs at song recording (recording, then bouncing the recorded part + new part in real time to a 2nd tape recorder etc).
I wouldn't buy one now though, even for historical purposes. They were very clunky machines and didn't exactly have stellar signal to noise figures.
The plastic transport controls are push buttons...and real difficult to push...like on the old 1950's tv remote controls. To play or stop or ff etc, you'd force down a button till it made a loud latching click noise..then the transport would go into whatever mode. Actually kind of an irritating process as I now think about it.
